Hi everyone, my name is Patrick Akio and for today's guest I
have Misha Fondenberg on with a passion for technology and
education. He's a full time content creator
and teacher in the DevOps space and he switched his career to
this space and cloud native engineering about 3 years ago in
record time. Actually, I get to pick his
brain on how he did that exactly and we zoom in on this
superpower called note taking. Enjoy.
I still remember a few days, not even a few days like years ago,
I came upon this term which was called DevOps.
And back then I was in operations and I could not touch
anything with regards to development.
And I thought, oh, this is what I was missing because I had some
software engineering background with regards to university and
education. And I found myself in operations
and I was like irritated by being responsible but by not
being able to change things. So then this term, DevOps,
really, I don't know, just pulled me in with regards to
their responsibilities and that's what I wanted to go
towards. When did DevOps kind of come
across your path? So I was at a point in life
where I had a few different career changes and I was 303031
years old at that time. So it was really like, I felt
that this is the time where I actually need to make a choice
and stick to it for, for a while.
I've I've experimented enough now I kind of know what I'm
about and what I want to do. And at that point, I had a
conversation with a friend of mine who is a data scientist,
data engineer, and he had been working in IT for four years at
that point. And I had been doing like
hacking together with him in my free time.
And we were good friends and he advised me that you should look
into DevOps because the projects we were doing, I was always
doing the infrastructure, but also writing the code right.
So I, I, I enjoyed both things and that's he, he pointed me in
that direction of, I think that would be a good balance for you.
So that was the way I came across it.
And it even took me quite a while to actually understand
what DevOps is about. And I'm, I'm still trying to
understand what DevOps is all about, but that's, that's how
someone actually just suggested that to me.
Nice. And that has been a very good
fit for me. How did you start your
educational journey then towards this, let's say craft?
Yeah. With regards to DevOps?
Well, it actually started well. I've been coding since I was
like 10 years old. We had this like class at school
with a couple of kids who were programming Visual Basic.
We had like the computer man of the school.
You still had that back in those days.
And he was teaching us that. And that's where my fascination
with it began. And when I was 13, I was playing
all these role-playing games, online role-playing games.
And then I figured out that you could script those characters,
you could script the mining and, and all of those things.
So that's when my, yeah, that's already where the education
started, you could say. So I very early on, I started
getting this automate everything mindset.
So always looking for ways to improve things and to automate
things. So the mindset was already
there. And then later when I got a bit
older and I started discovering Linux and, and this was all
just, I was working my day job and then in my free time I would
be messing around with these games and automating them.
This escalated and at some point I had like 10 servers in Germany
running a few hundred of these accounts were no way 24/7.
Yeah, yeah. And it was all scaling and
downscaling. And I did that together with a
friend. But your job, like your regular
day job, was it in the tech field or nothing related at all?
Not at all. OK, so this was completely on
the side. Yeah, yeah, this was completely
on the side. It was just out of sheer
interest and, and, and I always had this sense of if I could do
this for work, right? If this could be my job to mess
around with Linux servers and and configure them and and spin
up this infrastructure, that would be amazing.
But back then, I was living in Norway at the time, and
especially in Norway, it was very like, oh, you need to have
ACS degree and you need to have a masters and then maybe you can
start applying for IT jobs. Right.
Yeah, high bar. Yeah, very high bar.
So I never even really considered that I could do that.
And yeah, so that's where the the training started basically
in terms of mindset. So I already had quite a few,
quite a lot of experience with Linux and coding just from my,
my, my free time hobby projects. And then when I made a decision
of, OK, I'm, I'm going to go for it.
I, I want to become a dev OPS engineer.
And, but at that time I had moved back to the Netherlands
from Norway. So I was living in the
Netherlands and I just went all in on it and started studying
very hard on Azure certifications and improving my
Linux skills and at the same time applying for junior
positions, internships. Like I was basically willing to
work for free just to get my first entry into the field.
And then by by posting a lot and, and just applying for many
things. Actually fairly quickly I was
picked up for a traineeship by leveraging that story of
automating games for what, 10 years?
I love that or more. 15 years, so I didn't come completely
green, but I still had a lot to learn.
And yeah, that's when we started getting some Linux
certifications and Azure certifications, and then I got
my first placement, so. That's awesome man.
Congrats on that. Especially when you come from,
let's say you have this aptitude for technology and because of
gaming, like you've always been interested in automating stuff.
But like you say, in Norway there is a high bar of entry.
I do think this tech field is very unique in that there's so
much content to educate yourself, yet the bar to entry,
especially for people that are either early in career or
switching careers is still fairly high.
Do you think you would change anything nowadays?
Because I think a few years ago the market was different,
especially compared to nowadays where I do recognize that people
are having a hard time kind of landing either their first job
or switching careers to tech. Yeah, it's a real problem.
You know, it's a real problem because there's so many people
like me out there who really want this.
And they are doing every all the right things.
They are doing all the correct steps.
And they, they, they, they would easily be able to work in a
team, but they just don't get the chance.
And I think there should be more.
I it has been quite good so far, but there needs to be more
opportunities for people to come in and learn at a lower salary,
of course. Or yeah, probably, but just to
get that first experience, that first way in.
And yeah, I don't really have a solution for that at this point,
but they're, they're there should be more openness towards
that. I think.
I, I think you should not just look at how many years of
experience someone has or how many lead codes solutions they
did right there. But I like, I'm, I run a, a
community of people who come together and a lot, many juniors
come in because they are inspired by my story.
And what I always tell them is to you have to show that you are
passionate about something. That is, I think why I landed my
my first position so quickly because I, I really showed that
I wanted this and that I had been doing it for so long
already that yeah, like who doesn't want to work with
someone who is passionate about what they do, right?
It's the best thing. Yeah, it's the best thing.
So maybe there is something about the the interview process
or the way candidates reach the eyes of managers.
Like there's only so much you could convey in a one or two
page CV, right? But what I did is I started
writing A blog and then like getting a presence on social
media. And if anyone would look me up,
they would like be like, oh damn, yeah, this guy really
wants this, right? He's really just documenting his
journey. And that that's something I
always advise to my community members to, to do, especially in
the beginning. It's one more thing that you can
leverage. And I think that should should
be paid more attention to by in hiring process I think.
I think so too. I mean, I think it's slowly
trending towards it. And I, I listen to an audio
book, I think by Stephen Bartlett and he, he lays out
that what makes someone a good professional, you can fit into a
few buckets. 1 is skills and one is knowledge.
And I attributed that. And also he explains that that's
something you focus on more when you're early in career.
And then later on comes network, which you build up just by
virtue of working and knowing people comes resources in the
form of monetary or maybe a team that you work collaborate with.
And then the last one is reputation.
And I feel like we're pulling this reputation more towards
anywhere within the process. You can always work on your
reputation, right? Because it shows your passion
for something. It shows your aptitude.
If people know you for a certain something, then they attribute
that with you, which makes if it's DevOps or any type of
technology, makes it an easier hire.
Or at least it shows your passion online because that is
part of your reputation. I think that's very powerful
that people can leverage and it might be underutilized.
Currently, definitely. And it's it's not easy, you
know, it's not natural. It was definitely wasn't natural
for me to just start writing about stuff and putting
imperfect stuff out there. Yeah, but as my intention was
always to help other people and then it didn't really matter if
it was perfect or not. It was not, it took me a while
to realize this, but when you make that switch of, I'm not
sharing this for my own gain. I'm not sharing this because I
want to achieve this. No, I'm sharing this with the
intention of helping others or making the world a little bit
better. Then it doesn't have to be
perfect. And then it, I don't know,
people call it manifesting or but it does.
It does put something behind it that we can't really explain.
And then it's also probably more likely to be picked up I think
if it shines through when someone is doing it with bad,
not bad, but unwholesome intentions.
Like unauthentically. Yeah, unauthentically or AI
generated, yeah, that that just speaks laziness to me.
And and yeah, when I see that then I form judgements in my
mind. I'm I have pretty judge mental
character. Then you're out.
But then, yeah, when I see someone do that, then I'd like,
OK, well, this guy's not putting in the effort, so I I probably
wouldn't. Consider him.
Yeah, it's a different, it's a different approach.
I think it's a different path than probably you would take and
maybe I would take as well. Yeah.
But then like the people that are jumping in this tech field,
especially let's say years ago, it would all, it was always
expectations of a really good job where you might not have to
work really, really hard. I mean, I think you have to
think a lot, but laboriously, you sit in your chair, basically
you type away and then the salary is really good.
It's still really good. You just have to find it.
If that is the main reason or if those are the main reasons, then
yeah, we were talking about resilience and kind of the
longevity of it. That's going to be hard.
That's going to be even if you land the job, you might not even
like it for the long term. You might just be in it for the
money and you can do that. You have to be very disciplined
though, yeah. I totally agree.
I mean, I think many people want or they think they want to be a
developer or a DevOps engineer. But you have to be able to stare
at black screens for 8 hours a day, right?
With, with letters on it. I mean, it is, it is a, it takes
a certain kind of person to to actually do that day in day out
and enjoy it. I mean, yeah, I think this this
applies to any career that you should never do it for the money
because it's just not sustainable.
Like I, I came into it because I love the technology and just
this feeling that you get when you deploy something and scale
it up and it it actually works. There's to me, that is one of
the most satisfying things in the world to see happen.
But. It's satisfying and also the
most frustrating when it doesn't work.
Yeah, exactly. It's like this love hate
relationship. But that's what makes it
satisfying. It's sometimes it's so hard to
find the bug or to find what's going wrong, but when you
finally get it then it's it's great.
I'm curious to hear your take on this role that DevOps is playing
nowadays, because I see a lot of let's say the big cloud
providers trending towards pushing more for serverless
technologies. And then me from the software
engineering hat, I love serverless because I can just
provide my software. Sure, I have to set up a few
things with regards to the infrastructure, but then it
scales, scales automagically and I pay as I go or I pay as the
network scales the traffic. And I think that's beautiful.
Yes. And the DevOps role would be
more prevalent if we had less serverless I would say where you
have to, let's say maintaining your total cost of ownership is
a bit bigger by virtue of you having to do so.
Yes, well, I mean the, the cloud providers are making things a
lot easier than they were maybe 5-10 years ago.
Of course, I mean just just deploying a Kubernetes cluster
is relatively simple now, right? With services like Azure
Kubernetes Service, you start it up or preferably from code, of
course, by using Bicep, but you plug in your, your Azure key
vaults, the, the, oh, I forget the name, what syncs the secrets
from your Azure key vault CSI driver.
And you, you have your ingress controller.
It's all, it's all configured right?
It's super, super easy, relatively so.
I mean, yeah, serverless is making things a lot easier, but
is it also like I'm not very familiar or knowledgeable in
serverless technology, but is that also like the first thing I
think about is, OK, it might be very good if you're just a small
team or a small, small project, but on an enterprise scale,
right? If you're doing things on an
enterprise scale, are the costing going to be very high or
likely? I think you you likely pay.
For having that kind of be out of your hands, right?
Yeah. When we're talking about total
cost of ownership, you can go enterprise scale with a smaller
team and you pay a price for that.
And then the question is how much do you want to increase
your total cost of ownership and then have more infrastructure
and also more people. And that's then the trade off.
And I think people are even making that argument for going
to the cloud in the 1st place, yes, which I think is
interesting as well. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
So I mean, I think there's always going to be a need for
people who know Linux and DevOps methodologies because not
everybody is able, not every workload is able to work in the
cloud, right? Yeah.
Not everything can be using these basically SaaS services
that the cloud provides. So there's always going to be a
need for that. And also very often, like maybe
not so much with serverless, but it's easy to set up.
But when things go wrong, that's when you need the people who
actually fundamentally understand how things are put
together right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I still think I would pick serverless if I were to start up
something very easily because just by virtue of having that
small total cost of ownership, less things to worry about with
you're going to production and then testing your assumptions
and scaling from that part. Yeah, yeah.
I was wondering though, when we're talking about a cloud
engineer or DevOps engineer with regards to career path nowadays,
where would you advise someone to start?
Because I know you do a lot with regards to education and you've
also been on this path, let's say fairly recently.
Yeah. How?
How would someone start nowadays?
Yeah, so on that, like I, my, my, I create courses, I have my
school community, but I'm just trying to be useful to me two
years ago, right? That's basically the the idea.
So I, it was very hard for me to figure out what to do because
there's just so much information out there and DevOps scene so
big. So what I try to do is to
actually say, well, start here, do this and then build up from
there or analyse someone's situation and see where they
where they should improve. And recently I've been putting a
lot of thought into this. But they're the cloud
engineering and dev OPS engineering are quite.
They're similar, but different. Yeah.
And especially in the American market, dev OPS engineer, even
though there isn't really such a thing as a dev OPS engineer,
there's always that discussion. But in in the American market,
then a DevOps engineers usually assist admin with like 10 plus
years of experience who then knows how to code.
And then it's not a junior role, right?
It's not something that you would do as someone with one or
two years of experience. Generally here in Europe, it
seems to be a bit different. But there is where the cloud
engineer comes in, because cloud engineering works exactly with
these. They, they know these kind of
services that Azure provides. For example, they specialized on
AKS or they specialized on proficient infrastructure with
Terraform. I mean, someone needs to do it.
And even though software engineers can relatively easily
learn it, they might not be interested in knowing all the
details about virtual networks and how to secure it properly in
private endpoints and things like that.
So, and, and that is compared to the American definition of a
DevOps engineer, cloud engineering is a bit lower bar
of entry, I think. I think that's easier to learn.
There's more quality education material available.
For really good documentation, yeah.
I mean, you can I tell people like I'm not gonna make Azure
courses because all you need for Azure is the Microsoft docs and
John Savile. It's all out there.
Yeah. So I'm not gonna even gonna try.
Right. No, you don't have to compete.
No, I just say just use that. It's all for free and you can
learn everything you need to know to.
It helps to have a foundation in Linux, I always advise that, but
you can learn everything you need to learn from based on the
that information alone. Yeah.
So then what you educate also with regards to others is just
by filling in the gaps that that let's say those courses or
documentation would not give you.
Yes, yeah. And it's, it's very often about
stitching it together. Like one thing is to get your AZ
one O 4 certification, the Azure administrator.
But OK, then you know how to provision VMS with Terraform.
But the VM still needs to be configured, right.
If you're deploying a Linux VM, you still need to configure with
Ansible or something like that. So it's that is not covered with
these, with these, the cloud information.
So it's always about looking at where someone is, where they
want to go, and then trying to fill in those gaps or give
advice on maybe you should start here or maybe try this project
to see where your skills are at. I love that.
Yeah. I mean with.
My, let's say professional experience on a day-to-day, if
I'm in an assignment and I do hands on software engineering, I
have ideas on what would be interesting based on what I
face, right, based on business problems that I'm trying to
solve. I would know interesting tidbits
or just along the way from colleagues as well.
But if you're taking this role of a full time educator, how do
you then come up with the ideas and the insights that people are
looking for? Because then you're out of this,
let's say, business context. How do you get inspired?
Well, let's say like it's fairly recently that I went full time
on on this and I'm I'm, I'm, I'm, I'll be honest, I'm missing
the engineering already, so I'm not sure this is going to be
it's very fresh. It's very fresh and it's I'm
trying it out, right. I'm always about trying out
things and then see seeing what happens.
So I think it's very likely that in the future I am going to be
engineering for a few days a week or or just do six months
stretches of, of projects maybe if possible.
So that is my current plan of of keeping, keeping up to date with
these kinds of things. But the great thing is in this
community, everyday people are asking questions about, oh, we
have this happening at work, how do we solve it?
So it's not just me answering everything, it's actually the
community coming together and everybody is chipping in.
And just by virtue of that, I am being kept up to date, right?
I love that I see what people are struggling with and, and
what they need help with. And then I, I help them with
what I can. But very often other people come
in and then they get the solution that way.
Yeah, I want to pick your brain on how you started this
community aspect, but before we do, I know you're big on note
taking. And honestly, my note taking
hygiene, if I were to call it that, right now is a bit of a
mess because I have my existing notes and I'm trying to migrate
to this other system which has a lot of features and promises.
And I'm kind of in between and haven't done it yet because it's
like an uphill battle. Yeah.
What is like good advice for note taking or what really helps
you with regards to taking notes, going back on education
and reflecting and actually finding the gold?
Well, I made a course about now. Yeah, no, I will definitely
check that out. No.
What system are you moving towards?
Obsidian. Yeah, nice, nice.
So I have bare bones Apple Notes.
It syncs with all my I love the Apple ecosystem because it syncs
with everything. But then I'm like, yeah,
sometimes I get a laptop where it's not there and I want to
have things synchronized still. And sometimes I want to relate
to other things. And notes is very bare bones.
Basically, it helps me to get up and running.
So now I'm moving towards Obsidian.
Nice. That's the promise.
Well, there's a few tips or few words of advice that I generally
give and that is first is just start.
I spent a shameful amount of hours watching productivity
YouTube porn and then just trying this system.
That system, and I mean it. I did it as a hobby, but it's
not necessary to do that, right? So that is also partially why I
create these videos to cut through all of the the fluff,
right? So one thing I recommend is the
Para method by Thiago Forte. Very simple directory structure,
basically how you can use your notes.
And the second thing is I advise to carve out time to spend
quality time with your notes and your note taking system in in
instead of seeing it as something separate or or a, an
auxiliary tool, you have to start seeing it as the basis for
everything. Because my, all my thinking, all
my deep thinking, all my creation work happens in notes
and writing is thinking. If you sit down calmly and think
about something deeply and you're able to write and put
that into your own words, that's the the true verification that
you actually understand something.
So instead of like seeing it as a chore, you have to see it as
the actual work. The, the note writing the notes
is the actual work. That is the actual deep thinking
that you're doing and you're capturing that in writing.
So whatever you do, whatever you take notes on, carve out time to
actually spend time with that. And then lastly, have a system
where you can capture things quickly so you have a some sort
of inbox. I've gone with inbox without
inbox in several iterations, but after years I've landed all OK.
You need an inbox so you're able to jot something down quickly
and then later in a regular process come back to it and then
process these notes and put them where they need to go and link
them to the to the notes. Those are the three bits of
information I would advise. Interesting.
I, I tried to, let's say the inbox approach where I would, I
would time stamp things with regards to the day and then I
would have whatever would happen throughout my day.
But then I would also have recurring sessions with
stakeholders or with development teams.
And I was like, OK, maybe it's helpful if I have something
that's like a recurring just set document and then I attempt
stamp within that document for the last things and I make sure
it's sorted so the latest information is on top.
But then I have these two kind of workflows.
And then right now since January, I also moved to the
product side. So then I'm thinking in my
epics, features, stories and there's part of that system in
there, which is why I was saying this hygiene.
If I try out four or five systems at the same time, it's,
it's becoming a bit of a mess. Yes.
And I, I can manage it. But yeah, if I now have to go
back and restructure it, it's daunting, right?
Because I love taking notes. I think it's very good to just
jot on my thoughts either as I'm having a conversation with one
person or multiple people. Sometimes I go back on it and I
structure it and have it be nicely formatted, but most of
the time only when I need to, when someone's asking me for my
notes and I'm just embarrassed because it's just one liners and
I can, I can still piece everything together.
So then I do and then I share. Yeah, but I don't do that often
enough. Like it's not a part of my
habit. Yet yeah, that's the thing right
The the the next step of the note taking journey is the title
cast method. You may have probably.
Heard it. I've heard of the term, yeah.
And that that's by the German sociologist Nicholas Lehmann.
He had like 90,000 notes in his system.
Insane when he when he died, but he would always write as if
ready for publication. And that is something that I
also aim to do always. Like I should be able to pick up
every note from my from my system and then present that to
someone intelligibly, right that it should be.
It should make sense on its own. And it takes so much effort and
time to do it that way. But then you also start
filtering out stuff that like. If it's not worth that process,
then it's probably not worth having it in your note taking
system anyway. Yeah, if it's not worth that
kind of attention. That makes sense.
Yeah. What is in the outcome that
you've had? Because I, I know you asked a
person that has done that and has tried kind of these note
taking systems. Yeah.
But for me, it has to be worth it at the end of the day with
regards to how I structure my notes, if that's a benefit to my
education. Yeah.
Or the way I can convey information or what has been the
outcome for that for you? Well, that that I'm sitting
here. That's a good one.
Yeah, yeah, no, it's, it's it. First of all, when I started my
DevOps journey, I knew I had this insane amount of knowledge
that I needed to study and and convey.
So that's why I why I started taking notes in this way.
So it has been extremely helpful in facilitating understanding by
writing like we just spoke about.
But then I also at the same time started writing blog posts and
creating YouTube videos. And all of that starts with
writing. So it, it takes a while, but
when you do it for a year, then the turtle cast and the note
taking system starts to attain critical mass.
And then what what I mean by that is that instead of that, it
starts pulling energy out of you.
It actually starts to propel you forward because then now I can
literally sit down here and in 5 minutes I will have a fully
structured blog post in my own words, no AI, nothing.
Just based on my note taking system that I carry with me
everywhere. Because I put in the time
already and I know where it is, I can reference it very quickly.
So to me, whenever I I'm creating a course or when I'm
creating a video, usually there is not much research involved
because I simply base it on what I have done already.
That's great. Yeah.
So that makes the content creation and publication a lot
easier. If that makes sense.
I had a thought, but I lost it and that usually never actually
happens. That's probably the same with my
note taking though. Fleeting notes.
Yeah.
Honestly, back to then the community part, because I know
you started your educational journey and at some point you
decided, OK, I'm gonna just by virtue of you learning and also
sharing, giving back to the world, manifesting as you called
it as well. You were sharing content.
And I think that's very unique within this tech field.
Maybe it's because I haven't been in any other field, but I
think content is always being shared, right?
People are not really, how do you say that?
It's, it's an abundance of content.
People don't have a scarcity mindset at all.
If I've solved it and I've done something really cool, people
don't keep that to themselves. And I think that's phenomenal.
Yeah, because the next best thing is sharing it with others.
And I think it has to do with this passion that people have
for it. Because when someone says, man,
that's awesome, I never thought about that.
Something in me just fulfills and I and I'm on cloud 9 for the
whole day. Yes, yes.
Yeah. How did this kind of led to you
or lead to you starting a community?
Because that I, I know you, that's probably not the goal
that you had in mind in the first place.
Well, first of all, there there are definitely people who do
gatekeep knowledge and not everybody has this mindset
unfortunately. So it, it should happen more.
But I I totally agree there is an abundance of content and so
much good stuff being shared all the time.
And for me, what happened was I, I, I, I was thinking on about it
on the train, like why, why did I actually start YouTube years
ago, right? What what actually caused me to
do that? But it just seems something
interesting to do something new. And as I was creating videos, I
got started to get very positive feedback from in comments like,
Oh, I really like the way you explained this, or I really, I
really enjoy the way you, you talk basically those kinds of
comments. And then suddenly I was rewarded
the Microsoft MVP award. And then I got a few more
subscribers and people were actually asking me like, OK, so
how did you go from nothing to MVP in two years?
And then I figured, well, maybe I should start sharing that
knowledge in a more structured way because YouTube has always,
I've been like a bit of a side hustle that I did on the
weekends because I enjoyed it, but also like, it's not my main
thing, right? And then I thought, well, maybe
I should put a bit more thought into how I structure it and that
provided it as a course. And then I came across the
school platform who combines courses with community, which I
thought was very interesting because I don't know about you,
but I've done countless Udemy courses.
And then you have these Q&A sections and nothing happens,
right? You never get an answer.
And I thought it was a very interesting concept to actually
create a community about that education so you can actually
talk about it with fellow students.
And, and, and also for me as an educator, I love it when people
point out when I say something that's not correct, right?
Or that could be improved. And that happens regularly.
And then I just pin that on the on the thing, like, look at
this. I was wrong.
Make sure you read this right. Yeah, yeah.
How did you get over that initial hump then?
Because with, with comments also comes criticism.
Yeah. And with, I mean, especially
when you're fresh in there, it can actually, I mean sometimes
hit a nerve, sometimes actually hit you and demotivate you as
well. Now, I must say I've been very
lucky in in that sense. I like sometimes you get
something, but I, I can actually not remember having any like
really hurting comments or, or, or very negative feedback at
all, which is very surprising. Yeah, I've seen other Youtubers
comment sections and it's just a cesspit, right?
But I've been very lucky in that sense.
Or maybe YouTube is just doing a good job of protecting me and
filtering out the bad ones. But I have always had a rather
thick skin. I, I, I basically have a pretty
good idea of what I want to do. And it takes a lot to put me off
that path, right? And it takes a lot to divert me
from that course. So yeah, it takes a certain kind
of personality to to put yourself out there like that.
Yeah, that's for sure. I mean.
What's interesting to me is that when someone points out you're
wrong, you don't like trying shamefully hide it, but you take
it as feedback and you're actually like, look, I was wrong
here. Yeah, make sure to check this
out because this is the truth. I mean, there you have it.
It's, it's to me, the most important thing is the truth.
Nothing else really matters. I mean, I have a, I'm fairly
detached from my personality, right?
I, I don't take those things personal.
It's much more important to me that people who join my
community actually get a quality educational experience where
they learn the correct things. They're the right way to do
things that learn the truth. And that is much more important
than whether I whether I would hurt my feelings or if it would
bring me down. Yeah, I love that.
If the education is the essence, then it shouldn't bring you
down, right? Because someone actually, based
on what you said, it's like a layup and they found the truth
and then that's it. That was the essence.
I mean, it's the same at work, right?
When you make a mistake and when you bring down a server that
shouldn't have gone down and then like there are people who
would then try to cover it up, right?
And to hide the fact that it happened.
Yeah, I'm always very open about my mistakes.
And I say I'm sorry guys, this happened.
This is how I've solved it. And then I'll pay the price for
it, but that only contributes to maybe a new process being
created, or maybe we can put in some sort of gate to make sure
this doesn't happen again, right?
So I'm all about openness and honesty and the the truth is the
only thing that really matters. I love that principle that I
always live by. Perfect.
One of the last thoughts I still had was, let's say nowadays with
regards to all the skills and tools you have in your tool
belt. Yeah.
When you're picking up a new topic, how do you start?
Are you a reader? Are you a listener?
Do you start with your note taking next to you?
Like how do you pick up a new topic and basically educate
yourself to a point where you're comfortable also educating
others because you have this kind of truth in what it means?
So there's two kinds of people in the world.
There's those who get a coffee machine and then with that comes
an instruction manual. And then there are people who
sit down and read the instruction manual and then they
plug it in and then they start working with it and there's
people who take it out-of-the-box, plug it in, and
then figure it out. I am very much the first kind.
I'm always the guy who reads the entire instruction manual and
wants to know everything beforehand before I get my hands
dirty. And that is basically what
delayed my progress a lot in the beginning, even though I
progressed fairly quickly anyhow.
But I could have gone much faster if I had just actually
started applying the concepts that I was learning.
Yeah. So what I do these days, that's
also because I know a thing or two now, but I always try to
define a certain outcome. Like say if I want to learn
Kubernetes, I would say, OK, I want to have a simple web app
running on Kubernetes that takes data from a database.
Yeah, that's the end state. And then doesn't matter if it
takes me two months to figure all of that out.
But then at least I have a bit of a direction.
Because if not, you just end up in tutorial hell.
You just watch one thing and then 20% is relevant to what you
actually want to do. And of course, it's never
wasted, but it's not actually contributing to moving towards
that goal. Right.
That's also why I like certification so much, because
not necessarily because they like, there's a whole debate
about whether you should or shouldn't get certifications.
Yeah. But what I like about them is
that they give you a clear goal to shoot for and to structure a
life around, basically. Yeah.
And like a milestone. Yeah.
A milestone and a a clear path to achieve that.
So that's how I always try to approach these things, to get a
practical project, some idea, and then learn what you need to
learn in order to achieve that. Interesting.
Yeah. I, I would have put myself in
the complete opposite where I look at the manual and then I
just start playing around with it.
Yeah. And I did that especially at the
start. And I had people that educated
me and like guided me with regards to software engineering
and I got a lot of stuff done. Yeah.
But then at some point I came into a different organization,
different projects, and I was like, like, I should know how to
do this, but I always have to go back and Google things, like
more of the basic stuff. And then I realized I was
lacking in part of a fundamental understanding on how things
actually worked. And I could get stuff done, but
I felt like if I had that knowledge, I wouldn't have to go
back and search and fill the holes in my knowledge here and
there on the fly. So then I'm like more towards
actually reading stuff and getting a better fundamental
understanding and then starting. But then still I narrow towards
starting immediately because that's like my comfort zone.
Yeah, I would say. Well, you, you need like I, I
what I said like having an outcome in mind, like it does
predicate that you have an understanding of the
fundamentals. Yeah, I, I always say when, when
programming do at least one of these like 10 hour fundamentals
courses. So you know, at least about
variables, functions and and the basic stuff before you, before
you go into it. I I agree with you that there
is, there should be a fundamental understanding before
you go out into these more specified or specific things.
But yeah, the the primogen, you know I'm right, he tells his.
No, I don't actually. He's a YouTube very streamer,
very famous coding YouTube. But he he tells his story when
he they had like an interview question and he needed to filter
out some text from the output of a command.
And he described how he wrote this like 3 page JavaScript
program with all these complex functions where he could have
just used grab on the on the command line, right.
So knowing the fundamentals can actually save you so much time
if you know these tricks, right? Or the Linux, the Unix basics.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, especially I think
starting out having good fundamentals, it's hard because
I didn't do it that way. I I really started and I got
stuff done and it felt so good getting stuff done basically,
especially when you're like, OK, I kind of know how to do it and
it works and you see it work. It's really good.
I think it feels fulfills this kind of stimuli of doing it
again. Absolutely doing it over and
over. But then when I wanted to get
even better, when I looked at my colleagues and saw what they
were good at just by virtue of sitting next to them and doing
pair programming, I would see that their approach would be
different than mine. Instead of going in hands on
starting immediately, they would step back.
Sometimes not even code, but sometimes put some stuff down on
a piece of paper that was like, OK, this is how we're kind of
going to structure it. And then I would look at myself,
and this was years back. I still kind of find myself in
this trap sometimes that I'm like, OK, I have a structure in
my mind, I do it. Then I figure out along the way
that this actually doesn't fit that one.
I have to redo it. And then I'm like, I, I need
somewhere in between. And I think that only comes with
experience where you figure out kind of where you are, what is
still missing if that's fundamental understanding or
more of the practical hands on things and you go from there.
Well, it's like, that's why working in teams is so great,
right? Because then you would have
people like me who tend to read everything and then start and
then you who are more like, let's just do it right?
And and that's why having people of different proclivities works
so well and having in in the team so you can balance each
other out. I mean, there's always needs to
be a balance. And I don't think you
necessarily need to think negatively of the tendency that
you have, right? It can be a very good thing.
Like I think you would be a great SAS entrepreneur build
maybe building up small startups because you just go and and you
know what to do. And when I have a SAS idea, then
I spent weeks researching how to do it.
And then eventually I never do it because I just get confused
with all the research. Yeah, maybe I like being
flexible in like my approach and that's why I really like
learning from other people and see how they do it.
And then if I can be flexible enough to do it based on the
task, like optimally based on that flexibility, I think that'd
be really good. But maybe that's like a distant
dream, because that also sounds really hard.
That flexibility is so. Important.
It's really. Important to get 2 rigid, yeah?
Great man, I've really enjoyed this conversation.
I must say this has been a blast.
Likewise, before we round off, is there still anything you want
to share with regards to any of the topics we might might have
opened up or any lingering thoughts?
Well, we touched upon this problem of juniors entering the
the market. I really want to impress to to
stress that it is possible if you follow your dreams and if
you're willing to put in the hard work.
It's not going to happen by itself, but if you're willing to
put in the hard work, it is possible.
I'm the living proof of it. Even though the market is a bit
down, if you really do it, it can, it can work out.
And I also want to encourage people who are in hiring
positions to, to look a bit further than just the CV and
see, look at the person behind and give, give people a chance
because it's very important that we get passionate people into
the industry who do it because they love the technology and not
just in there for the money. Yeah.
Absolutely great. My camera, I lost it.
Thank you so much for listening. Normally you're over there now
you're over here. Put some comments in the
comments section below. Let us know what you thought of
this episode and we'll see you on the next.